A Few Words About Protests in the Age of Trump

There seems to be little doubt now that the Trump presidency is likely to be marked by large-scale public demonstrations. The prospective Trump presidency already is marked by large-scale public demonstrations and he hasn't done anything yet except run a chaotic transition process and sneak out for a steak.

But whatever demonstrations occur, if Trump makes good on some of what he said he would do during the campaign, those demonstrations are not going to be limited to the streets of the big cities. And they're not going to be limited to angry college students and the Black Lives Matter movement. They're not even going to be limited to Democrats, or liberals, or any of the fantastic beasts of the Breitbartian collective imagination.

For example, if he's true to his word and he reverses the present government's position on the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel and perennial Republican fetish object, there is going to be massive resistance all along the proposed pipeline route that is going to make the current situation in North Dakota look like a bird walk. And it's not going to be strictly a lefty affair, either. The defeat of Keystone on the ground in places like Nebraska required the participation of farmers and ranchers as well as environmental activists. The issues involved are not limited to environmental concerns; the movement out there also is a resistance to the use of the power of eminent domain in the service of a Canadian energy company. That's a volatile issue that crosses party lines, economic gullies, and cultural ravines.

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You can see the possibilities also in a story in The Washington Postto which Paul Campos at LGM pointed us today. A Native tribe living in the Sonoran Desert is promising to resist any attempt by the Trump administration to put a part of its famous immigration fence across the tribe's ancestral land.

"Over my dead body will a wall be built," Verlon Jose, the tribe's vice chairman, said in an interview with local radio station KJZZ. Jose said he invites Trump to visit the reservation to see why a physical border wall would not be a good idea for the tribe or the country. Without the tribe's support, Trump could be forced to accept a 75-mile-wide gap in his wall. Federal law requires the Bureau of Land Management to consult with tribal governments before making any changes to land use, as the Huffington Post noted. Trump's only option for building a wall on the land would be through a stand-alone bill in Congress that would have to condemn the land and remove it from the trust for the Tohono O'odham nation, which is recognized by law as an autonomous tribal government. Amy Juan, an O'odham tribe member and co-founder of the Tohono O'odham Hemajkam Rights Network, said a border wall would be "devastating," not only for the tribe but for the animals, wildlife and water that flows across the border. It would make it even harder for tribe members to visit and care for burial sites in Mexico. "The effects would be bigger than ourselves," Juan said in an interview with The Washington Post. "As a people, as a community, it would be a literal separation from our home. Half of the traditional lands of our people lie in Mexico."

The question, of course, is how a Trump administration would respond to widespread civil disobedience and, so far, the auguries are not promising. It's already an article of faith among the Trumpsters that the current demonstrations are some sort of plot concocted by George Soros. Over the weekend, no fewer than four possible names for attorney general were floated. Each of them was horrible in their own way, but all of them shared a common history of authoritarian solutions. And any administration that employs even one person who thinks that crazoid Sheriff David Clarke from Milwaukee would make a good fit to run the Department of Homeland Security needs careful minding.

At the moment, back home on the shining banks of the Menomonee, Clarke's office is under investigation for allowing an inmate to die of thirst in Clarke's jail, and Clarke himself has gotten crossways with goggle-eyed homunculus Scott Walker by allegedly fudging the facts about Walker in his upcoming biography. Clarke was nice enough to provide a window into his attitude about widespread civil disobedience in a guest column in The Hill, an old-school Capitol Hill tipsheet that seems to have repurposed itself as a kind of sewage treatment plant for stuff that isn't good enough to appear on Breitbart.

You probably saw a teacher or long lost relative share the Facebook meme that "the future voted" Tuesday, with a reference to the overwhelming percentage of 18- to 25-year-old Americans who voted for Clinton. I'm a pretty tough cop but a country run by these entitled, coddled, petulant snowflakes makes me cringe. We saw what happens to this everyone-gets-a-trophy generation when the real world, in the form of a Donald Trump victory, makes them confront reality.

And that's not even to mention the fact that the president-elect himself is so thin-skinned that he could swallow a flashlight and pretend to be a Japanese lantern. We do indeed live in interesting times.